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Tuesday, 13 June 2017

Magic Money Trees

One of the
great works of the past is the Rev. Gilbert White's "Natural History And
Antiquities Of Selborne". He lived from 1720 to 1793, in rural seclusion
in Hampshire but noted and commented on the immediate life about him, notably
plants. His book has a web site
and you are welcome to read it.

Yet he lived
at a time when there was a magic money tree, MMT, and could not fail to be
aware of what happened. If asked he might have advised that trees are fine when
in full growth. But they can be chopped down, catch diseases, through their
seeds create dense and impenetrable forests and be costly to maintain. Also,
sooner or later their fruits run out.

In the Middle
Ages the monasteries became the MMT's of their time. Then King Henry VIII,
advised by Thomas Cromwell, and needing serious money to build, decorate, run
and maintain his new 34 palaces; he might have called it infrastructure and job
creation, nationalised them.

This induced a
collapse in the economy. The monasteries etc. were at the centre of the wool
trade, a major part of the economy, and critical to the foreign trade at that
time. Also, they were the medical centres, education providers and retirement
homes.

The ensuing
land grab created new magnates and landowners and in the next century absolute
monarchy went as well. This was because King Charles I, following the example
of his father, King James I, subsidised the arts and spent heavily, only to
lose his head.

It is possible
to see MMT's in money economies as long ago as the Emperors of Rome and in
other parts of the world, the Chinese Empires and those of say, the Mughals.
There is always the question, what happened next?

This ten minute cartoon tells the tale of John Law in France at the
beginning of the 18th Century in simple fun terms.

This three minutes of satire deals nicely with our very own British
South Sea Bubble that enriched so few and impoverished so many. When the
question arises about the 17th Century Tulip Mania the answer was it could
never happen again.

The 19th
Century was a period of one crash after another across the world all involving
the search or believed findings of MMT's. See Wikipedia on "Long
Depression" and "Baring crisis". This was central to the
imperial policies of the European countries as well as both the militarism and
nationalisms of their time. My posts on "Gold Fever" of 4 January and
2 May 2016 refer to these.

But my
favourite MMT for personal reasons, I am proud to be Nesbitt, goes to that of
the 1770's. The man was Arnold Nesbitt and there is a telling biography of him here read down on the History of Parliament web site,
Research, Members, as he was an M.P. along with his close colleague Sir George
Colebrooke. It is strange how so many M.P.'s are involved in so many financial crashes.

It
is my view that the Colebrooke and Nesbitt crash of The City in the 1770's cost
us the American colonies. There are differences of view about this being a good
or bad thing. It involved in particular the East India Company which meant that
the effects hit almost everyone with wealth. It leads us inevitably to Jane
Austen.

Jane,
who lived at Steventon along the road from Selborne, had a close friend with a
shared interest in exotic plants. She was Emma Colebrooke who had married
Charles Bennet, Earl of Tankerville. Emma was the daughter of James Colebrooke,
brother of George above.

One
of the features then of the interests in plants was not simply as ornaments but
in an age before synthetic chemicals their potential for profit as medicines or
colourings or flavours. These Nesbitt's were family and close connections with
the Sneyd's that Jane did know. Jane was certainly interested in money and how
much men were worth, in any case a brother was a banker.

Coming
to the present via a complicated story of family histories we end up in the
Liverpool of the Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, John McDonnell, a recent
convert to the idea of planting an MMT to save us all from inconveniences, such
as paying rents, repaying loans or counting the pennies. His Marxist beliefs would seem to
contradict this, but there have been a number of nations recently who married
Marxism with an MMT only to collapse into poverty and social breakdown.

There
has been a row over John's education, he was at the De La Salle secondary
school, whose alumni include Wayne Rooney but before that alleged to be at a
high fee paying "prep school". This is a nonsense. The place he was
at was then an RC seminary where many were called for the priesthood but few
were chosen. It would only take a forbidden trip or two to the cinema etc. to
miss the cut.

But
it is possible that the Parish Priest who first recommended John was of a
family linked to the McDonnell of McDonnell Earls of Antrim. Also, John's grandfather at one time lived a
couple of hundred yards away and in the same parish as the grandchildren of a
Kavanagh of Carlow. In 1851 Morgan Kavanagh of Carlow was sharing a house with
Karl Marx.

So
when John changed from one faith to another the leap was not as long as you
might expect. Moreover the connections go back to people close to and related
to Arnold Nesbitt, creator of one of the great MMT's of modern times and the
one which arguably went most spectacularly bust.

But
John's MMT for the huddled masses and students also depends on rich people
paying their taxes, admitting their liabilities and eschewing the off shore and
other schemes.

In
fact, he will have to persuade his fellow alumni Wayne Rooney and his
associates, who recently lost a court case to the HMRC, to pay more tax than in
the past.

3 comments:

I understand that much of the money Henry VIII raised from the raid on monasteries went on compensatory pensions to the disbanded religious. Henry was dangerously incontinent financially as well as sexually.